HOTSEAT- Roots music: Harris explores African beginnings

Mississippi To Mali was easily one of Corey Harris's most ambitious projects. The 2003 record was an outgrowth of his involvement in a Martin Scorsese documentary that featured the New Orleans-born blues guitarist collaborating with several top Malian musicians.

The project paired the slave music that has evolved into a quintessential American art form with the ancient musical traditions from which it came. Things didn't go so well at first.

"The record company actually originally didn't want to put it out, and it was quite a fight, because the sound quality wasn't up to their standards," says Harris. "I had to go back and clean up a lot of that noise. It's a field recording, recorded very inexpensively."

But the disc was subsequently released to widespread critical acclaim.

Although Mississippi To Mali came out several years ago and Harris followed it up last year with the decidedly more domestic Daily Bread– complete with full pre-production efforts, much to the label's relief– his reverence for traditional West African music isn't yet spent. Lately, his interest has been further stoked by the visit of Guinean guitarist Mohamed Kouyate, who arrived stateside in early March and began playing shows with Harris shortly thereafter. The duo will likely continue to perform until Kouyate's departure in late May.

"We've been doing a lot of jazz, a lot of reggae, and a lot of Malian traditional griot music, done in an electric way," says Harris. "When I first heard him, he had never been to Mississippi, but he could play Mississippi blues perfectly."

Naturally, they took a trip to the Delta. "What has been most interesting to me is seeing his reaction to the history of America and the history of Charlottesville," says Harris. "I was surprised about the things that he did and did not know about the history of black people in America– slavery and segregation and so on."

Harris describes taking Kouyate to visit the storefront on which Emmett Till was standing when he whistled at a white woman, leading to his brutal lynching by white murderers whose subsequent acquittal sparked the national civil rights movement in the 1960s.

That event still weighs heavily on Harris's mind, even though the trip is over. "Even Charlottesville is a plantation town," Harris says. "People don't talk about it; they really like to revere one side of it– Thomas Jefferson and all that– but they have yet to deal with who really built this town."

Harris and Kouyate's joint performance at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar late last month briefly opened a window into the interchange, with Harris dedicating a song to recently deceased Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure while Kouyate zipped around his own fretboard with slick jazz licks copped from George Benson.

Harris won't take credit for that one. "I'm really along for the ride," he says.